I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).
The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices.
A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia.
This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less.
Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.
This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.
My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.
Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
All the sources I have found seems to make software engineering just too broad of a bubble to measure.
1] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/software-en...
Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND.
That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?
First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.
Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now.
I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment.
(Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
Truth be told, the majority of people are not hungry self-learners that will thrive in retirement. You need to be disciplined for that - or else it's gonna go downhill, real fast.
Partial retirement is something I've seen a lot. Or people simply retiring from companies, but doing work as consultants for their last decade or two.
It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies.
I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are).
Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much.
I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more.
I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.
Microsoft also got “caught”— CEO Satya Nadella made a poorly worded comment that resulted in many women getting raises (so clearly at least some had hard evidence they were getting underpaid): https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/10/10/microso...
I know of at least 4 cases were female colleagues of mine were getting held to the bottom of the band (or in one case the band was lowered).
> It's not about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along... And that, I think might be one of the additional superpowers that quite frankly women who don't ask for a raise have. Because that's good karma. It'll come back because somebody's going to know 'that's the kind of person that I want to trust. That's the kind of person I want to really give more responsibility to.' And in the long term efficiency, things catch up. And I wonder… And I’m not saying that’s the only approach.
> I wonder whether taking the long-term helps solve for what might be perceived as this uncomfortable thing of ‘hey, am I getting paid right? Am I getting rewarded right?’ Because reality is your best work is not followed with your best rewards. Your best work then has impact, people recognize it and then you get the rewards so you have to somehow think that through, I think.
Had I seen this in 2014, not knowing Nadella, I'm sure it would've sounded to me like a horribly disingenuous attempt by an executive to suppress wages.
Also possibly tone-deaf, and not only due to the venue and the context of ongoing exploitation/marginalization of women, but also due to non-gender-specific abusive industry behaviors, including one exposed shortly before then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I am considering leaving tech because selective biases play a larger role in hiring and advancement than they used to despite all efforts to the contrary. After talking with other people I am not alone in thinking this. I am willing to leave tech even though I cannot afford to because the hit to my finances is temporary but the barriers to my career from remaining in tech are permanent.
Let me discuss selective bias in a bit more detail. When I first started programming candidate qualification was centered around the needs to the business. For example, did a candidate understand the minimum criteria of working in a given technology plus the advanced criteria that harmed user interaction, slowed execution speed, or some other measurable concern. Those days are long gone, at least in high level languages.
Now the name of the game is programming fashion. Specifically, does the candidate write code according to a current trend a given team or interviewer wants without regard for any performance or measurable quantum.
That change is disruptive but not in a healthy way. In the old days the desirable and rewarded developers were those who performed well, such as writing the best code in the least time. The people on the right side of a bell curve. Replacing that with fashionable and non-measurable factors limits candidate selection to the center of the bell curve, which are people who do not perform as well but are better rewarded for it.
If I am willing to abandon a long time tech career even though it will hurt and have found others that share my frustration I can only imagine that perhaps this might be some small factor in why some women might want to leave in general.
I suspect this problem has increased despite all efforts to the contrary because all efforts to eliminate hiring/reward bias were typically limited to identity factors that carried provable legal consequences.
There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality as a matter of survival, just your friends in the Bay Area won’t “oooh” and “ahhhh” when you tell them you work there.
Why is that a Gendered issue? Are there no men working in menial jobs that have no work life balance? Or should we just not give a shit about them?
Keep in mind that the results of this report will be somewhat self selecting. There won't be much wage disparity shown if the people on the wrong side have already left. It is stated that wage disparity is a major reason that double the number of woman have left the industry by mid-career.
Or, you know, the dads could pitch in with running the household.
"Is it really just sexism? An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603)
On the contrary: world-wide, poor countries tend to have a larger proportion women in tech (and medicine, and ...). Not because they want to, but because they cannot afford anything but the most high-paying jobs!
>If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay.
I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.
I still have a very comfortable life. I'll probably wash out if there's another downturn, but I'll have saved up enough money to comfortably start over and do something else.
The idea of quitting because I earn significantly less than other people with the same years of experience (or less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
This isn't statistical evidence, this is an anecdote about you and your friend circle.
> than other people with the same years of experience (or
> less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers
> than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
Sure, and that’s just fine and sensible. But you might feel differently if they were in fact worse engineers than you. Which is the position that women are in, unless you think that sexism and gender bias doesn’t exist.
In a sexist and gender biased system, the pay gap is not “someone is making more who is better than I am” it is “I am making less than everyone else outside my gender group whose experience / talent matches mine and some who aren’t even as good as I am.”
Can you see why that might be a little less fun and why you might feel frustration towards a field structured that way?
Why? Have you tried to get into such companies? What part of the interviews are you failing at? If you've given up before you've even tried, then sure, you'll never get in.
You don't have to be a ridiculously good engineer get in.
Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.
That's why surveys like these are useful. There are many companies who will happily underpay unsuspecting employees for years or decades on end.
You probably made the right choice though. Even at compensation levels posted in this survey, there's no value for your money here.
I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day.
I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".
I'm autistic, so this is an area I have trouble in.
What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.
I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I’m a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now?
My impression is that it’s probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).
I think the statistic is skewed due to two things. First, high earners at 15 years moving off into management, moving into more fulfilling jobs, or retiring early, pulling their high salaries from the average. Second, other devs with 15 years moving from outside FAANGM to FAANGM, getting a pay bump for themselves but bringing down the FAANGM 15+ averages.
> Each of us is more than a statistics. Everyone has their own struggle. The average person doesn’t exist.
Is see this trope all the time, but it’s an illusion. Compare apples to apples.
Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren’t even aware the employer is paying this. It’s the light blue bar in the chart in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
Healthcare is complicated. Most cushy tech jobs in the US come with the premiums included. But in the US there is always a significant risk of large and unpredictable medical expenses. (Especially when you consider that there's no guarantee that you'll keep your job!) That one is difficult to put figures on.
I don't personally care about daycare and college savings as I'm not planning to have kids.
They're mostly representative of Seattle, NYC, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Also note that housing prices in these regions are astronomical, particularly the Bay Area. Even a relatively small house can cost millions.
There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else.
So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing.
This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.
If companies cooperate in this way even when they might otherwise be competitors, then so should workers.
Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.
Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.
In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?
This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603
Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.
